Archive for the ‘Squid’ Category

They’ve taken on Moby Dick, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and even a bunch of Goonies.

While giant squids have been captured in the past and alleged parts of them have surfaced here and there…seeing one in the wild has been something of a Holy Grail moment that misty-eyed scientists and cryptozoologists have dreamt about forever.

Everyone can prepare to drop your jaws because there is now video of one of these mysterious monsters going about its business deep in the Pacific Ocean.

A team of three Japanese scientists spent over 400 hours crammed in a 31 foot submersible over the course of 100 missions about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima.

At a depth of 2,066 feet, the lights from the submersible reflected onto the creature’s silver skin as it eyeballed the sub curiously before it swam off.

The Discovery Channel’s new branch, Curiosity, is keeping the footage secret until the season finale later this month when they’ll unveil it to the world for the first time…

Spermatophores. Your brain’s already spinning with possibilites because of the word ‘sperm’. Spermatophores are like little cups of sperm complete with a timer device built-in. Sperm-bombs. It’s how squids do their biz and propagate.

Here’s what sounds like the start of a lame joke and ends in a fairly disgusting punchline that I’ll ruin with the next sentence: A 63-year-old South Korean woman walks into a bar and orders Calamari.

A couple of you are WAY ahead of the story by now.

While enjoying her plate of calamari the woman reported feeling a painful “pricking, foreign-body sensation in her tongue, cheek and gums.”

In Korea, calamari is parboiled in certain places which means that, unlike here in the non-sperm-exploding-in-your-mouth dining experience we prefer, the organs are all still intact.

Fisherman found a 23-foot long, dead squid floating about 12 miles off the Florida coast near Port Salerno. The fisherman hauled it ashore and donated the body to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“We pulled up… thought it was something to fish on, a pallet or something like that. We looked at it, all three of us were like ‘holy mackerel,’ ” recalled Benz.

It turned out to be a 23-foot long giant squid. It’s a rare find in our waters. The main part of the body was about 11-feet long, but with its two long tentacles, it barely fit in the 23-foot boat Benz was riding in. But he knew they had to bring it ashore.

“Nobody believes a fisherman,” said Benz. “It didn’t seem it had been dead long, the tentacles were still moving and it was sticking to you when we got it in.

U.S. and Filipino scientists have announced the discovery of a new species Teuthidodrilus samae, which they immediately named “squidworm.” It is a flat, eyeless, free-swimming worm with up to ten squid-like appendages. It also has twenty five or more pairs of translucent fins arranged on its sides for swimming. The creatures were found between 6,650 and 9,550 feet below the surface of the ocean in the Celebes Sea between Indonesia and The Philippines.

That having been noted, the squidworm differs dramatically from all known worms in that it is a polychaete — a type of bristly annelid that is generally found in marine environments — and seems to be a missing link between benthic polychaetes living on the seafloor and pelagic ones dwelling much further up.

It glows deep red. It’s two feet long. It is your new standard in marine life glamour.

A large new species of deep red, glowing squid has been discovered living near undersea mountains in the southern Indian Ocean, scientists announced Monday.

At about 28 inches (70 centimeters) long, the as yet unnamed species is relatively big—though other squid can reach as long as 65 feet (20 meters), some species are barely three quarters of an inch (1.5 centimeters).